Photography giants to speak at local gallery

BANGOR – “A Maritime Album: 100 Photographs and Their Stories,” the current exhibit at the University of Maine Museum of Art, is a collaboration between John Szarkowski, curator of the photographs, and Richard Benson, who wrote the essays for the book that accompanies the exhibit. They will give a gallery talk at 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 28, at the museum. Tickets for the event have been sold out.

“Having Benson and Szarkowski here is equivalent to the Rolling Stones coming to Bangor, in terms of the photography world,” said museum director Wally Mason. “Szarkowski is one of the most important people in the area of modern photography living today.”

For nearly 30 years – 1962-1991 – Szarkowski was director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is credited with bringing photography out of the darkrooms of technology and into the highbrow world of art. He greatly influenced how photography is perceived as an art form.

Szarkowski’s book, “Looking at Photographs,” juxtaposing photographs with his erudite text, played a role in creating a general audience in America for photography. It taught a nation how to appreciate photography as art.

It was Szarkowski who introduced the idea that photographers are artists, not merely technicians or observers who record on film what they see.

Szarkowski championed the work of many photographers, including Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston and Gary Winogrand.

I met Szarkowski in 1993 when he was doing a stint as artist in residence at Florida International University in Miami. He was re-emerging as a photographer, after a 29-year hiatus, with his show, “New Photographs/(After MoMA),” at the FIU photography gallery. The show featured images of his barn in New York state, and of landscapes in Arizona. At that time, Szarkowski was the guest of Mirta Gomez and Eduard del Valle, photography professors at FIU.

I found Szarkowski seated alone on the del Valles’ deck. He was going through a stack a mail. At my tentative approach – my friends were in another part of the house and did not know I had arrived – he indicated a chair and I sat down. I was acutely aware that I was in the presence of a VIP with a formidable reputation for wit, personality, charm, intelligence and ebullient conversation.

We introduced ourselves and a short silence ensued as Szarkowski continued to read his mail. I was too awed to utter a syllable and, perhaps sensing that, he too was quiet. He tossed in front of me a large cream-colored card he had been looking at. He tapped it with a long forefinger, and said, “What do you think of that?” It was an invitation to a retrospective show of fashion photographer Richard Avedon’s work.

“Are you going?” I asked. Szarkowski shook his head, no, and went on reading his mail. “Why not? Didn’t he do fabulous portraits of famous people, aside from those special photo effects in the film ‘Funny Face?'”

Szarkowski gave me a long, sizing-me-up look and nodded his head, yes, in answer to my question. Then he said, gravely and enigmatically, “Poor Richard.” His laughter, when it came, was full of mischief and delight. It set the tone for the evening, the opening night of his exhibit at FIU.

A Szarkowski retrospective, “John Szarkowski: Photographs,” opened Feb. 5 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and he was the subject of an article in the January issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

“Benson is equally important as Szarkowski, but in a different way,” Mason said. “The way photographers disseminate their work to the public is in books. Benson brought to photography books a quality of printing that wasn’t there before. All roads lead back to Benson and the way he transposed black-and-white negatives to the printed page.”

Benson, who began teaching at Yale in 1979, is the dean of photography there, a post he has held since 1996. A friend of John Szarkowski, Benson has worked as a photographer and printer since 1966. He has done extensive work in the hand printing of photographs in ink and in photogravure and offset lithography. Currently, much of his work centers on production of fine photographic books, including “A Maritime Album,” “The Face of Lincoln,” “The Work of Atget,” and “The American Monument.”

“A Maritime Album,” was published in 1997 by The Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Va. Szarkowski wrote the introduction and selected the photographs. The book’s user-friendly format, photographs juxtaposed with Benson’s essays, replicates the “Looking at Photographs” format.

The exhibit will be on view until April 2 at the museum on Harlow Street. To obtain more information about “A Maritime Album,” call 561-3350.